Former Jehovah’s Witness tells of struggle to escape the church
A new book documents one woman’s life as a Witness and what it took to leave this sinister organisation, which has a long history of gender victimisation, sexual abuse and efforts to cover it up. By
Sam Human’s new book, Maria’s Keepers, tells the story of Maria, a former Jehovah’s Witness in South Africa. Maria managed to escape the church’s doctrines and control, but her freedom came at a price – she was shunned by her family and could never see her mother or sister again.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses is a Christian-based religious group that professes an unparalleled dedication to Jehovah (God). It claims to be politically neutral, racially and ethnically transcendent, and has a membership of eight million people worldwide.
Yet many former Witnesses claim that it is a fear-based doomsday cult that considers itself above all other belief systems.
Allegations of secular, cultish behaviour, homophobia, money laundering, brainwashing and countless accusations of institutionalised sexual abuse abound.
Entering the church is easy, but leaving it can be a matter of life or death, as Maria and countless others discovered. Read an excerpt below.
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As Lloyd Evans writes in The Reluctant Apostate: “I had no idea Witnesses felt love was conditional. Forget the idea of blood being thicker than water. If you dare to disagree about Jehovah, that blood loses its viscosity in a heartbeat. Sons and daughters become dead to the very people who gave them life, and moms and dads are treated as invisible by those whom they cradled in their arms as babies.”
Against a backdrop of selfless love and a seemingly benign, unconditional serving of God, there are former Jehovah’s Witnesses who have left the church, and attest to a vastly different reality to that portrayed on the official Jehovah’s Witnesses website. One such person is Maria, a former Jehovah’s Witness in South Africa, whose story may resonate with current or former Witnesses. Shamed and ostracised by her family and her congregation for not only questioning her faith, but also for standing up against the sexual abuse she endured by the very people she “served” and respected, she was eventually excommunicated from her faith and shunned by her family.
Of the many double standards that she was forced to tolerate, Maria’s experiences of sexual abuse and emotional “gaslighting” at the hands of senior members of her community church are by far the most distressing. These were “crimes” for which she was not only shamed, but also blamed. Sadly, Maria’s experiences are not necessarily unique. A damning 2016 report by the Australian Royal Commission, Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, revealed evidence from case files held by the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation that recorded allegations, reports or complaints of child sexual abuse by 1,006 members of the organisation.
The Royal Commission found that children and young adults in the organisation are not adequately protected from the risk of child sexual abuse; that the organisation does not respond adequately to allegations of child sexual abuse; and, given their outdated internal disciplinary procedures, for the most part, are lacking in their understanding of what constitutes sexual abuse.
The Royal Commission also found that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ internal disciplinary system for addressing complaints of child sexual abuse was not child- or survivor-focused. “Survivors are offered little or no choice in how their complaint is addressed, sanctions are weak, with little regard to the risk of the perpetrator reoffending.”
Finally, the Royal Commission considered that the organisation’s general practice of not reporting serious instances of child sexual abuse to authorities demonstrated a serious failure to provide for the safety and protection of children.
Similarly, Maria’s story reflects the failure of her Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation to respond adequately and compassionately to her claims of abuse and mistreatment, driving her to a state of desperate unhappiness, angst and isolation.
A BBC News report in February 2020 revealed that 20 former Jehovah’s Witnesses were suing the church in the UK over historical sexual abuse, with one former elder claiming that the church had failed to ever involve the authorities.
The report claimed that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ policy of not punishing alleged child sex abusers unless a second person, in addition to the accuser, has also witnessed it (known as the two-witness rule), or unless the abuser openly confesses (unlikely, of course), to be problematic.
The official response to this report from the Jehovah’s Witnesses camp was that its elders do comply with child-abuse reporting laws, even if there is only one witness present, and that they always notify the police if a child is in danger, which the former elder of the church vehemently denied, accusing the church of failing to involve the authorities over many years.
According to the BBC News report: “John Viney, the former elder, says he was himself abused between the ages of nine and 13 by a distant family member who was an active Jehovah’s Witness: ‘I know for a fact now that there are parents that haven’t done anything about the abuse of their children by others because they don’t want to bring reproach on Jehovah’s name.’”
In 2019, Rolling Stone magazine reported on a 2019 report by a Us-based magazine and multi-platform publisher, The Atlantic, that alleged the existence of a decades-old database of accused paedophiles in the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation that had been withheld from authorities for years.
This database is said to contain thousands of names and addresses of accused child molesters in the church, as well as detailed reports of the specific allegations against them. The database was thought to have been prompted by a 1997 letter that the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society sent to all congregations in the US, instructing their leaders to document all known abuse allegations and their alleged perpetrators, and to send the report back to Watch Tower in a sealed envelope without informing the authorities. These letters were then reportedly used to compile an in-house database of known perpetrators in the US chapters of the organisation.
Maria’s own experience in the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church in South Africa is a story of manipulation and despair, but it is also a story of triumph and hope. In leaving the church, Maria was forced to give up her family; she is forbidden to communicate with them and is forever shamed in their eyes. At the same time, though, she has “escaped” the many years of torment, confusion and rejection she suffered at the hands of the church.
Today, as a former Jehovah’s Witness, she stands tall and tells her truth, potentially exposing what lies “behind closed doors”. DM
Maria’s Keepers: One Woman’s Escape from the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church in South Africa by Sam Human is published by Penguin Random House SA (R280).